Protagonist Quotes & Sayings

The Hulk is the most difficult Marvel property because it's always about balance. Is he a monster? Is he a hero? Are you going to root for a protagonist who spends all his time trying to stop the reason you came to the movie from happening? It's always a dance — Joss Whedon

With my earlier books, I got quite bored being with one protagonist all the way through. With the Alex Morrow books, I wanted to do something a bit more holistic, so there were lots of different points of view, and I wanted to look at aspects of crime that you don't tend to look at. — Denise Mina

The more complex and overwhelming the threat to a protagonist, the better the opportunity for the author to create a compelling conflict and a dramatic resolution. — Terry Brooks

As Deborah sits below a tree to give advice to her people, the cat could envision itself above Deborah. In the cats mind, the visual allusion would first point to the prophetess as being a predator. This consideration would not be hard to reach for the lucid intelligent cat as she is giving advice to her people here as how to engage in war. Envisioning this text, the cats would find it hard not to recognize the predatory nature of the human beneath it. This fact means that Deborah becomes, in feline hermeneutics, the antagonist. The prophetess would be seen as a danger to the cat. This could lead the cat to deduce that the enemy of the prophetess was a fellow protagonist. Then the advice that Deborah gave to Barak would seem as a malicious attack on a ally or worse an innocent. — Leviak B. Kelly

How long are you going to let yourself be dragged passively by the plot? You had flung yourself into the action, filled with adventurous impulses: and then? Your function was quickly reduced to that of one who records situations decided by others, who submits to whims, finds himself involved in events that elude his control. Then what use is your role as protagonist to you? If you continue lending yourself to this game, it means that you, too, are an accomplice of the general mystification. — Italo Calvino

Katniss isn't the kind of hero we're used to seeing in fiction. She reacts more than she acts, she doesn't want to be a leader, and by the end of Mockingjay, she hasn't come into her own or risen like a phoenix from the ashes for some triumphant moment that gives us a sense of satisfaction with how far our protagonist has come.
She's not a Buffy. She's not a Bella. She limps across the finish line when we're used to seeing heroes racing; she eases into a quiet, steady love instead of falling fast and hard. — Jennifer Lynn Barnes

The only thing that makes me put down a book is if the characters are boring, or the situations aren't fraught with the potential for some great change or I don't mind if an author torments his protagonist, but I do expect a decent payoff in the end. — Michael Boatman

Every time I revise, life just gets a little worse for my protagonist. — B.K. Raine

films like The Never-Ending Story (1984), Stranger than Fiction (2006), and The Adjustment Bureau (2011). Have you seen any of these films? Then you understand hermeneutics. In each case, the story revolves around a protagonist engaging his own life as a fictional story being written either in this world or in another, seemingly by someone else. As he reads and interprets the text of his life, however, he discovers that its story or plot changes. He discovers the circle or loop of hermeneutics. He discovers that as he engages his cultural script as text creatively and critically he is rereading and rewriting himself. He is changing the story. — Whitley Strieber

I'm drawn particularly to stories that evolve out of the character of the protagonist. — David McCullough

Should you create a protagonist based directly on yourself? The problem with this - and it is a very large problem - is that almost no one can view himself objectively on the page. As the writer, you're too close to your own complicated makeup. — Nancy Kress

There is one final point, the point that separates a true multivolume work from a short story, a novel, or a series. The ending of the final volume should leave the reader with the feeling that he has gone through the defining circumstances of Main Character's life. The leading character in a series can wander off into another book and a new adventure better even than this one. Main Character cannot, at the end of your multivolume work. (Or at least, it should seem so.) His life may continue, and in most cases it will. He may or may not live happily ever after. But the problems he will face in the future will not be as important to him or to us, nor the summers as golden. — Gene Wolfe

Deprived of human intercourse, I inevitably overvalue the imagination and expect it to make the mundane glow with an aura of self-transcendence. — J.M. Coetzee

Stories that are truly successful are the ones where the protagonist is the bad, dirty one. The human story is a fairly dark one with painful and dangerous impulses that we all have. And that's coupled with a fortress-like psychology that most people have, protecting them from the awareness of the fact that they are part of this human experience — Ryan Blacketter

I think Dr. Willis McNelly at the California State University at Fullerton put it best when he said that the true protagonist of an sf story or novel is an idea and not a person. If it is *good* sf the idea is new, it is stimulating, and, probably most important of all, it sets off a chain-reaction of ramification-ideas in the mind of the reader; it so-to-speak unlocks the reader's mind so that the mind, like the author's, begins to create. Thus sf is creative and it
inspires creativity, which mainstream fiction by-and-large does not do. We who read sf (I am speaking as a reader now, not a writer) read it because we love to experience this chain-reaction of ideas being set off in our minds by something we read, something with a new idea in it; hence the very best since fiction ultimately winds up being a collaboration between author and reader, in which both create and enjoy doing it: joy is the essential and final ingredient of science fiction, the joy of discovery of newness. — Philip K. Dick

Perfect heroines, like perfect heroes, aren't relatable, and if you can't put yourself in the protagonist's shoes, not only will they not inspire you, but the book will be pretty boring. — Cassandra Clare

Mindi Scott has a real talent for getting inside her protagonist's head. She sketches out Coley's story in grand swathes, and then paints in all the little details, so that you feel as though you are enmeshed in Coley's brain: thinking her thoughts, feeling her confusion, anger, and, in the end, pain. I just don't think it's possible to read this book and not identify with Coley in some way. — Amber Benson

By the time you have your protagonist attempting to assassinate the Pope, you've sort of signaled that everything is on the table. — Brian K. Vaughan

People miss those who they love. It brings tears to my eyes to see the longing for me. But it's my decision to do fewer films and more protagonist-based roles. For me to take up something, it has to make a lot of sense to me. — Rani Mukerji

Say what you will about it, Hell is story friendly. If you want a compelling story, put your protagonist among the damned. The mechanisms of hell are nicely attuned to the mechanisms of narrative. Not so the pleasures of Paradise. Paradise is not a story. It's about what happens when the stories are over. — Charles Baxter

It's also important to remember that no one is "the bad guy" or "the best friend" or "the whore with a heart of gold" in real life; in real life we each of us regard ourselves as the main character, the protagonist, the big cheese; the camera is on us, baby. — Stephen King

This dazzling, unput-downable debut novel proves beyond a doubt that Dan Wells has the gift. His teenage protagonist is as chilling as he is endearing. More John Wayne Cleaver, please. — F. Paul Wilson

If the point of life is the same as the point of a story, the point of life is character transformation. If I got any comfort as I set out on my first story, it was that in nearly every story, the protagonist is transformed. He's a jerk at the beginning and nice at the end, or a coward at the beginning and brave at the end. If the character doesn't change, the story hasn't happened yet. And if story is derived from real life, if story is just condensed version of life then life itself may be designed to change us so that we evolve from one kind of person to another. — Donald Miller

Your protagonist suffers from mental illness, but that fact is not central to the — Leslie J. Anderson

There are those who don't understand the nobility of horror fiction. 'Isn't there enough horror in the world?' they ask. For all other forms of literature, the value of human life is optional. For horror fiction, it's absolutely necessary. If we don't value the life of the threatened protagonist, we can't be scared. And through our fear, we better understand the individual fears and values of our species across the world. — E.C. McMullen Jr.

'Five, Six, Seven, Nate!' opens on my 13-year-old protagonist packing up a duffel bag and bidding his Midwestern town goodbye, heading off to start rehearsals for his New York City debut in 'E.T.: The Musical.' — Tim Federle

Identify the moral dilemma driving the novel. the successful novel will haunt a reader because it deals with some ethical or moral dilemma that makes the reader wonder what he or she would do in the protagonist's place. — Rick Riordan

I've come to realize one thing, that stories are always bigger than we are, they happen to us and we are their protagonists without realizing it, but in the stories we live, we aren't the true protagonists, the true protagonist is the story itself. — Antonio Tabucchi

The way I wanted to write it, is with a hero, or sort of a pure character who was the protagonist. And the antagonists were these demonic evil children, cause when you're a kid, seven or eight years old, and you're looking at the world around you - everything seems black or white, good or bad. — John Wozniak

Lars is played by Ryan Gosling, the Prince of Tics, whose idea of acting is to wait a few beats before reacting to other people's remarks, as if acting were merely a matter of adhering to the seven-second delay rule. Jack Nicholson has made a career out of doing this sort of thing, as did Paul Newman, as did Marlon Brando (who the other two learned it from), but they didn't do it all the time and they were more fun to look at ... Lars And The Real Girl joins a number of other recent films in the category of motion pictures where the director doesn't know that his protagonist is unsympathetic. — Joe Queenan

When the protagonist breaks the fourth wall by looking at the camera in a movie, it's generally been used for comedic purposes, rather than feeling like they're looking into your soul. — Chris Milk

Tokyo Heist is a fast-paced, exotic reading adventure, a story where The da Vinci Code meets the wildly popular manga genre! Author Diana Renn infuses protagonist Violet with plenty of chikara (power) and Renn's fresh, spot-on author's voice is irresistible. I couldn't put it down! — Alane Ferguson

When I first began writing In the Country of Men all I had was the voice of the protagonist. He intrigued me and my desire to want to know him and his world became almost compulsive. — Hisham Matar

Watching From Withing protagonist Dr. Jesse Baine says, "The only place I can fathom that is truly private is the space between your ears. Think about the sheer number of surveillance systems, automated ID tracking and police brain-print scanners. What is privacy anyhow? And, why would anyone protest the advancement of such tried and true [surveillance] technology? That's a bit like rising-up against the aspirin!" -Daniel LaMonte — Daniel LaMonte

Lost Wax"

My love gives me some wax,
so for once instead of words
I work at something real;
I knead until I see emerge
a person, a protagonist;
but I must overwork my wax,
it loses it's resiliency,
comes apart in crumbs.

I take another block;
this work, I think, will be a self;
I can feel it forming, brow
and brain; perhaps it will be me,
perhaps, if I can create myself,
I'll be able to amend myself;
my wax, though, freezes
this time, fissures, splits.

Words or wax, no end
to our self-shaping, our forlorn
awareness at the end of which
is only more awareness.
Was ever truth so malleable?
Arid, inadhesive bits of matter.
What might heal you? Love.
What might make you whole? Love. My love. — C. K. Williams

When your protagonist bores you, you're in trouble. — Patrick DeWitt

When the machine of a human being is turned on, it seems to produce a protagonist, just as a television produces an image. I think this protagonist, this self, often recognizes that it is a fictional construct, but it also recognizes that thinking of itself as such might cause it to disintegrate. — Mohsin Hamid

And you look like a protagonist." She was talking as fast as she could think. "You look like the person who wins in the end. You're so pretty, and so good. You have magic eyes," she whispered. "And you make me feel like a cannibal. — Rainbow Rowell

Many of you remember The Scarlet Letter, the novel that wardrobed its protagonist in a stigma or sign of reproach. But "A" is not the only letter a person can feel she is wearing. Some of us have looked like we spilled alphabet soup on our sweaters. Beloved, if you are wearing any kind of reproach from your past - especially if victimization has placed a letter there that never belonged on you - may God remind you of the cross of Christ and memorialize the victory it brought you. Let Him cut that old piece of fabric from your life, roll it in the blood of Jesus, and cast it away forever. — Beth Moore

Free will is something that people struggle with so much, but it's very simple to me. Carl Jung said at the same moment you're a protagonist in your own life making choices, you also are the spear carrier, or the extra, in a much larger drama. You've got to live with these two opposite ideas at the same time. — Wayne Dyer

If you look at the great Westerns, and at Greek, Roman, and Norse mythology, they all contain elements in common: a harsh landscape; demons or outlaws trying to stop or kill the protagonist; and there are mythical legends at their core, innate in all cultures. — Simon Toyne

She had to save herself from every last one of them. All of them, the people at the orphanage, the foster care system, the middle school, they were all outsiders and strangers and a possible threat.....The counselor couldn't prove otherwise. — Noorilhuda

A circular plot structure, often seen in adventure novels and quest fantasies, is a narrative devise involving setting, character, and theme. Typically a protagonist ventures from home (or the starting place of the story), goes on a journey, often a dangerous one in which many challenges are overcome, and then returns home a changed person. The plot is usually chronological, with the events occurring in a setting that becomes a circle. By returning the character to the place where he started, the author can emphasize the character's growth or change while also highlighting the theme of the story. — Carl M. Tomlinson

I'm a filmmaker, and I was most influenced by Hitchcock's films. How he could plant such deep enriched characters and then make us care both about the antagonist and protagonist was masterful. — Paul Haggis

I never thought of life as a dance, but I guess it made sense. Your dance is unique. It's yours and yours alone. Your feet are never still, always finding a different path and it's that path that takes you anywhere. You're always searching, finding a song that claims your soul. Once you find it, you revel in it until it is your turn to take your final bow. — Nicole Gulla

Ostwald was a great protagonist and an inspiring teacher. He had the gift of saying the right thing in the right way. When we consider the development of chemistry as a whole, Ostwald's name like Abou ben Adhem's leads all the rest ... Ostwald was absolutely the right man in the right place. He was loved and followed by more people than any chemist of our time. — Wilder Dwight Bancroft

Dogma not only blinds its protagonist, but it muzzles all other opposition. — Maajid Nawaz

You are the protagonist and author of your life's story. — Jessica Hagy

When one hears the argument that marriage should be indissoluble for the sake of children, one cannot help wondering whether the protagonist is really such a firm friend of childhood. — Suzanne La Follette

Because there is actually something very interesting in Goodfellas, how the style of the film changes as time goes by and based on the mental state of the protagonist. — Alex Cox

How-Ya-Do's eyes were even larger than usual as he cowered on Cricket's shoulder. The both of them were speechless, shocked into silence, and Face-to-Face with Magic itself!
"You scared the spark right out of us, well speak-up for goodness sake before I sic' The Hummers onto you both," she warned while pointing to the massive army of bees. — Darwun St. James

It's easy to find surface goals and stakes (to save the word, to stop the bad guy, save a life), but you often find that those aren't deep enough to help you create the plot. You run out of problems for the protagonist to tackle pretty quickly. The trick is to find the personal stakes and then work from there to determine the goals. People act when they want to (something to gain) or have to (something to lose). Personal — Chris Eboch

Aurora, you're a child, live like one, don't act like one. Enjoy the innocence, dump the immaturity. — Noorilhuda

We 'chicks' have munched our popcorn while romantic comedies became just comedies, and then each female protagonist got recast for Matthew McConaughey or Seth Rogan. — Emma McLaughlin

I think more people are going to continue reading YA as well as reading other books because they have learned that they can find books there which they will truly love: a teenage protagonist is close enough to adult so readers of whichever age can sympathise and empathise with them. — Sarah Rees Brennan

I saw her note the way I hovered over the various ethnicities on the form. First the 'white' box, then to the airspace over the 'black' box, a kind of momentary hesitation, a protest of stillness, a staring into the abyss of everything I did not know about myself. She, like me, was made of halves. — Olivia Sudjic

I started writing novels while an undergraduate student, in an attempt to make sense of the city of Edinburgh, using a detective as my protagonist. Each book hopefully adds another piece to the jigsaw that is modern Scotland, asking questions about the nation's politics, economy, psyche and history ... and perhaps pointing towards its possible future. — Ian Rankin

We are each the protagonist of our life story. — E.L. Tenenbaum

In short, when we read a story, we really do slip into the protagonist's skin, feeling what she feels, experiencing what she experiences. And what we feel is based, 100 percent, on one thing: her goal, which then defines how she evaluates everything the other characters do. If we don't know what she wants, we have no idea how, or why, what she does helps her achieve it. As Pinker is quick to point out, without a goal, everything is meaningless.6 It — Lisa Cron

Any claim to actual identification as a drama must rest upon the construction of a plot independent of the assignment of affliction to the protagonist. — David Mamet

Like my fictional protagonist Tom Thorne, I love country. My tastes go back a bit further than his do, and I still listen to stuff from the late '70s and early '80s. — Mark Billingham

This is the time to remember that I'm the protagonist in my own story, facing every challenge with grace and wit. — Maya Van Wagenen

People always want to identify a writer with their protagonist. — Monica Ali

... the midpoint of each film is the moment when each protagonist embraces for the first time the quality they will need to become complete and finish their story. It's when they discover a truth about themselves. — John Yorke

Observe, Chagatai, the protagonist of every work of fiction is Humanity, and the antagonist is God. — Ada Palmer

The large majority of teenagers who attend Higgs are soulless, conformist idiots. I have successfully integrated myself into a small group of girls who I consider to be "good people," but sometimes I still feel that I might be the only person with a consciousness, like a video game protagonist, and everyone else are computer-generated extras who have only a select few actions, such as "initiate meaningless conversation" and "hug. — Alice Oseman

Wolf Boy is absolutely beguiling. Evan Kuhlman has boundless empathy for all his characters, and his wonderful protagonist Stephen is, in turn, boundlessly inventive ... This is an auspicious debut. — Valerie Sayers

And here, of course, we come to the one occupation of a female protagonist in literature, the one thing she can do, and by God she does it and does it and does it, over and over and over again.
She is the protagonist of a Love Story. — Joanna Russ

The reader is going to imprint on the characters he sees first. He is going to expect to see these people often, to have them figure largely into the story, possibly to care about them. Usually, this will be the protagonist. — Nancy Kress

In most films - especially in regards to the protagonist - really from the get-go they set up some scenario that endears that character to the audience. Or imbues him with some nobility or heroism or something. — Joaquin Phoenix

I always felt a little worm inside me: 'Now you need to write a novel with a woman protagonist.' — Carlos Fuentes

He also knew the language of The Klingons, but the army had no use for it. — Noorilhuda

The black person is the protagonist in most of my paintings. I realized that I didn't see many paintings with black people in them. — Jean-Michel Basquiat

The conventional Aristotelian plot proceeds by means of a protagonist, an antagonist, and a series of events comprising a rising action, climax and denouement. — John Kessel

I'm a sucker for a screwed-up protagonist. We all have issues. — Chelsea Cain

Thackeray is careful not to present a protagonist who is malevolently evil from birth; to trace a figure like this is unrewarding certainly to novelist and reader alike. — Martin J. Anisman

You know, you're not aware of it, but you're following the action of the film through the body of the protagonist, you know? You feel what he feels when he jumps, when he leaps, when he wins, when he loses. And I think I just took it for granted that, you know, we can all do that, but it became obvious to me that men don't live through the female characters. — Meryl Streep

A stage play is basically a form of uber-schizophrenia. You split yourself into two minds - one being the protagonist and the other being the antagonist. The playwright also splits himself into two other minds: the mind of the writer and the mind of the audience. — David Mamet

My mother tells Tina that she doesn't like books where the protagonist is established as Sad on page one. Okay, she's sad! We get it, we know what sad is, and then the whole book is basically a description of the million and one ways in which our protagonist is sad. Gimme a break! Get on with it! — Miriam Toews

Something snatched onto Crickets' left leg, and it was rapidly pulling her into the depths away from the wharf. Air-bubbles restricted her view in the pre-stirred water, as she kicked furiously against the high strength of her unknown assailant. Being from Louisiana, Cricket's first instinct told her she was going down to a certain-death by Alligator! — Darwun St. James

It's not all 'Jane Eyre' out there. In her sweet, honorable, slightly passive-aggressive way, Jane was as perfect as a protagonist can get while remaining interesting; in fact, she's one of my favorites. But most characters are more morally ambiguous. — Susan Isaacs

Consider the different narrative styles within the story, and the glee with which the "moralistic narrator" celebrates Aschenbach's fall - maybe, then, this is a hostile verdict and the international fame is warranted after all (given that Mann modeled his protagonist so closely on himself, it would be quite odd if he had intended Aschenbach's literary inferiority to be a fixed part of the interpretation). — Philip Kitcher

In the Metaverse, Hiro Protagonist is a warrior prince. — Neal Stephenson

Men grow up expecting to be the hero of their own story. Women grow up expecting to be the supporting actress in somebody else's. As a kid growing up with books and films and stories instead of friends, that was always the narrative injustice that upset me more than anything else. I felt it sometimes like a sharp pain under the ribcage, the kind of chest pain that lasts for minutes and hours and might be nothing at all or might mean you're slowly dying of something mundane and awful. It's a feeling that hit when I understood how few girls got to go on adventures. I started reading science fiction and fantasy long before Harry Potter and The Hunger Games, before mainstream female leads very occasionally got more at the end of the story than together with the protagonist. Sure, there were tomboys and bad girls, but they were freaks and were usually killed off or married off quickly. Lady hobbits didn't bring the ring to Mordor. They stayed at home in the shire. — Laurie Penny

Don't act like a protagonist Raghu, be human," she said.
"Like Salman?" I asked and chuckled, she didn't react though. — Kavipriya Moorthy

In Catcher in the Rye, the protagonist Holden Caulfield mentions reading books that make him wish he could be friends with the author and be able to call him on the phone and so forth. I would consider a literary work that made someone feel this way a success. Furthermore, it's the only kind of success in literature that means anything to me. — Thomas Ligotti

I'd love to write something for a male protagonist. That's sort of the next frontier for me. I think it'd be really amazing to write the kind of parts that I love for women but for a guy. — Lena Dunham

The male author unthinkingly creates a world in which every single member of society is male except - hey presto! - when the protagonist feels like getting laid. Especially common in science fiction; apparently many writers assume that in the future women will die out. — Howard Mittelmark

There is a social contract in "Fight Club" and in "Choke" where the protagonist has deceived a whole bunch of people. In "Choke" it's all of these people who think that they've saved his life, and really care about him because they've embraced him and they've been his saviors. In "Fight Club" it's all of these people who are dying of various diseases, and they thought that Edward Norton was also dying so they allowed him really strong pent-up emotions. — Chuck Palahniuk

When you write a story, don't just write it - live it;
When putting words into the mouth of a protagonist (or any character) imagine yourself saying them and while writing about the reaction of the listener, write it the way you would react.
Let the conversations not be meant merely to be read but felt as well.
If you do not feel what you write; how can you expect the readers to feel it? — Arti Honrao

Like the protagonist of her 2006 novel, 'Love and Other Impossible Pursuits,' Ayelet Waldman is a Jewish redhead who attended Harvard Law School and is madly in love with her husband. But the obvious similarities end there. — Katie Hafner

You don't really understand an antagonist until you understand why he's a protagonist in his own version of the world. — John Rogers

That's the difference between a godly person and an atheist. Our stories are shorter and don't assume the protagonist is an idiot. — P.Z. Myers

And you look like a protagonist ... You look like the person who wins in the end — Rainbow Rowell

The novel form is about the protagonist's struggle to transform his arbitrary, fragmented, given experience into a narrative as meaningful as his favorite books. — Elif Batuman

Much of our inner dialogue is this constant reaction to experience by a selfish, childish protagonist. — Dan Harris

In prose, leaps of logic can be made while the protagonist thinks about things and arrives at conclusions. Even with voiceover, there's no real way of having an inner voice without it taking over the entire story. — Denise Mina

I gravitated to Judy Blume early on. 'Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing' was my favorite, with a realistic and relatable protagonist in Peter Hatcher. When I reached the fourth grade, I made the leap to science fiction and never looked back. — Jeff Kinney

Henry Miller wrote novels, but he calls his protagonist Henry, often Henry Miller, and his books are in this gray area between memoir and novel. — Leslie Fiedler

If she ever got fat, she thought, or if she ever said anything fat, she would lock herself in a bathroom and stay there until she died," thinks the young protagonist Molly Fawcett. "Often she thought how comfortably you could live in a bathroom. You could put a piece of beaver board on top of the tub and use it as a bed. In the daytime, you could have a cretonne spread on it so that it would look like a divan. You could use the you-know-what as a chair and the lavatory as a table. You wouldn't have to have anything else but some canned corn and marshmallows ... — Jean Stafford